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Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#261

Post by claudiojulio »

Ndymium wrote: post #252
claudiojulio wrote: post #227

I don't like the operators' logic in elixir. There should be one for assigning variables, one for pattern matching and there is no rebinding of variables. Something like: //for assignment x = 1 //for pattern matching x == 1 Automatically translated.

Then what would you use for testing equality? And what would you use if you were pattern matching _and_ assigning in the same statement? I.e. {:ok, value} = function()

Could be like that:

// equality with is already

  1 == 1.0 //true
  1 === 1.0 //false
// assigning

  x = 1
// pattern matching

  x ^ 1
// pattern matching and assigning

  x =^ 1 or x ^= 1
And they should remove the rebinding that is useless. But I find it very difficult for that to happen at that time.

Automatically translated.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#262

Post by joelbluminator »

pmarreck wrote: post #258
joelbluminator wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think new languages wont be able to break in the top 10 without a mega corp pushing them. The market is too saturated and there is a language for everything under the sun. Elixir is just facing too much competition for web stuff and doesnt enjoy Google pushing it.

I don't think it's necessary for a language to be in the top 10 to be considered a success. If the people who use it, wouldn't use anything else, then that is the success.

As long as you're aware that hiring and maintaining will be significantly harder then yes you're right. But that also means there's no reason to choose esoteric tech X for yet another CRUD app; you would pick Erlang/Elixir when it actually makes sense and only then.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#263

Post by fastball »

pera wrote: post #81
midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

I strongly disagree with your generalisation regarding the tooling: Mix and Hex are without any doubt some of the most pleasant tools I have ever used. (I personally don't care about IDEs so can't comment on the lsp implementation or idea plugins)

> complains about tooling in IDEs

>> I strongly disagree (doesn't use IDEs)

??

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#265

Post by ramchip »

shdh wrote: post #256
nahuel0x wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Erlang provides something that Kubernetes/Docker/Systemd isolation does not: fine granularity / per request isolated processes. Is the difference between a code bug killing a single call in a VoIP system vs killing an entire OS process with hundreds of them.

Do you mean actors? I kinda hate how they’re always referred to as processes. https://github.com/actix/actix https://github.com/akka/akka

The actor terminology isn't used in any official sources since Erlang processes are not quite "actors" in the actor model sense. They were inspired by OS processes.

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-June/07979...

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#266

Post by digianarchist »

midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

Just on the hiring point. There are three companies to my knowledge using Elixir in Toronto. I applied at two and the responses were 1. Not enough professional experience using the language. 2. Very low salary expectations on their end. Pretty bad for Toronto but especially poor for hiring in what is essentially a niche language.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#267

Post by abledon »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #111
whalesalad wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am bummed out to see that this is the top comment. I don't doubt your experiences but I hope that other people do not latch on to this and use it as a strong argument against using Elixir. All of these complaints are skin deep and kinda petty, to be honest. > Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. This is a bizarre criticism of…

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language. We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and o…

what area/work does your company do? advertising?

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#268

Post by abledon »

lbhdc wrote: post #151
midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

I worked on an elixir project at a ruby shop for about a year. We had complex distributed system, and were replacing core ruby services with elixir. Ultimately the project was a failure, and was re-re-written in Ruby, and the Elixir devs were let go. We faced similar issues to you, bad tooling, weak libraries, and very few knowledgeable devs. Finding people to hack on elixir was extremely difficult, and likely the dr…

thank you for sharing, I am removing elixir from my resume after reading all these comments haha

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#269

Post by dimgl »

svrtknst wrote: post #163
dimgl wrote: post #93

So here's my experience as a hobbyist. I really enjoyed using Elixir when it gained some traction around 2017-2018 and found the language to be beautiful. The documentation is also great. Here's a few reasons why I never kept using it for my own projects. Most of the time Elixir feels like overkill. It's easier to use Node.js or Golang to create simple services or prototypes. The mental overhead of having to go from…

> I would rather have had something closer to Koa I'd just use Plug then. Not every tool suits every job

This is what I used when I used Elixir. But I can't say I prefer it to the other tools that are available in other languages. Pattern matching was cool, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#270

Post by midrus »

deallocator wrote: post #260
midrus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

response.text()) .then(html => { $refs.dropdown.innerHTML = html }) " @click="open = true" >Show Dropdown Seriously? This has to be a joke.

why would you load the dropdown HTML separately, just render it along in the template with x-show="open" and have the @click="open=true"?

This is an example from their docs. That's why.
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